Monarchy went against my beliefs. I knew about Jordan’s prisons. The best that could be said of them was that they were probably not as bad as those in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. People were repressed, but less so than elsewhere in the region. Palestinians in Jordan had a difficult time, but no one stole their homes and threatened to expel them en masse as in Israel and the territories it occupied. No state official prevented them from taking jobs, as in Lebanon. They were not denied passports, as in Syria and Lebanon. The crown that Hussein had passed to his son left Jordan more peaceful than its neighbours.
Beyond the valley’s villages were the Bedouin tents, rows of them in white, beside white sheep and a tethered white donkey. About five miles short of the river was Jordan’s lazy border post. Within its walls, a triangular yard was bounded by an arrival hall, a departure hall and a café. A rusting bus waited in the middle to deliver the day’s last shipment of travellers to the other side. I made the mistake of walking into the departure building, whose offices were locked and whose windows for three different categories of traveller – Arab, Jordanian, non-Arab – were shut. A policeman in starched khaki guided me to the arrivals building. Since the intifadah began in September 2000, one room served both purposes. I filled in forms and a polite official stamped my passport. I paid the five Jordanian dinar departure tax and boarded the unlit bus with a driver and three other passengers: an old man in a white keffiyeh; his wife in a white scarf and a beautiful olive dress embroidered in scarlet eagles’ wings and pink rosebuds; and a younger man in a lightweight business suit. He called the old man ‘Haj’, a title of respect for someone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Christians who had gone to Jerusalem were also called ‘Haj’.
At five o’clock, the driver pulled the door shut. After a few warm-ups, the engine started. As the bus turned to leave the post, we saw the last royal portrait, of the two kings, father and son, Hussein and Abdallah. A gold crown hovered in a fair blue sky above them, a trinity whose spirit might pass from head to head but was eternal in its protection of the people, of the family, of the tribe.
I was thinking of something Prince Talal had said to me the night before. Talal, like his uncle, the late king, and his first cousin, King Abdallah, had received his formal education abroad. His school was Harrow, and his undergraduate and graduate degrees were from Georgetown. He rode motorcycles and liked Western music. He was a crack shot and a good horseman. He said that Western politicians who met people like himself thought of them as ‘good Arabs’. I paraphrase what he said, because I did not write it down. It went something like this: ‘I dress like them. So they think I am not really an Arab. It’s like being an honorary white. But I am as much an Arab as any Bedouin who has never left the desert. And, if I have to choose, I choose to be an Arab.’
He had just told me that Jordan had arrested some of the Islamic fundamentalists of Osama bin Laden, who had tried to blow up a Jordanian phosphate plant. The Jordanians were passing information about threats to Americans in the US and the Middle East to Washington. They wanted to help, especially when the fanatics were as opposed to the Hashemite throne as to the American government. But they could not go all the way, as President George Bush demanded with his ‘You’re either with us or against us’ speech. Nor could Jordan support General Sharon’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ that was a war on Palestinians under military occupation. Jordan could not, however much it disapproved of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, favour the sanctions that deprived Iraq’s people of medicine and of equipment for the restoration of sewage treatment and other basic services. To Talal, there were no good and no bad Arabs, measured on a scale of Americanization. There were good and bad people based on their humanity.
The sky in the king’s fresco was a clearer blue than the one towards which our bus rumbled across the deserted plain. We came to sets of metal gates and a long runway, as if we would fly into the darkening horizon over the River Jordan and into Canaan in our sweet chariot. This was no-man’s-land, the nether-world that separated each state of Greater Syria from the other. No one lived here. No one governed the tribal buffer. No farmers farmed, no livestock grazed and no trees cast shadows to obstruct the view from either side of the other. Concrete pillars – dragon’s teeth, in American military parlance – stood sentry at intervals of ten yards on both sides of the highway. I don’t know if the land was mined against infiltrators, but nothing grew out of that cement-powder soil. Two miles of protected desolation brought the bus at last to the ‘Police Security Directorship – Bridge Security’. Metal screamed on metal, as the ancient brakes of our border shuttle stopped us crashing into the gates. A Jordanian policeman boarded and collected vouchers that confirmed we had paid the departure tax. The driver slammed the doors, fired up the engine again and released the brake. We rolled past a sign, the last I would see in Jordan. It wished us all ‘Bon Voyage’.
The first Israeli fence was a little further. We stopped. We waited. We waited a long time. The old man sitting in front of me, who had been patient for a quarter of an hour, was the first to speak. ‘Why are we waiting?’ ‘Who knows?’ the driver answered. His daily route between the two border stations had accustomed him to waiting. This was his last trip of the day, and he would return empty. The old Haj repeated his question: ‘Why do they make us wait so long?’ The other passenger, the man in the suit, told him, ‘Be patient, Haj.’ The Haj looked at his wife, who smiled at him, and shrugged. The driver got out and opened all the luggage compartments for inspection by two Israeli soldiers. He drove on to a second gate, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to the Allenby Bridge Crossing Point’. We were still on the East Bank, waiting to cross a tiny suspension bridge that the Israelis, following the British, named for General Allenby and the Jordanians called the King Hussein Bridge.
Impatient, the driver took the bus up to the gate and said to a woman soldier inside the guard post, ‘This is the last bus.’ She told him to reverse to where he had been. He backed up to our original position twenty yards away, with the perilous grinding of old gears and brakes. The moment he stopped, the woman soldier waved to him to come forward again. At last, we were going through.
‘Palestine, formed and surrounded as it is, is a land of
tribes. That it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary to Nature and Scripture.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
On the West Bank
INSIDE THE ISRAELI BORDER SHED the old Haj asked me to fill in his forms. At this crossing between an Arab country and occupied Arab land, there were no Arabic entry cards. All were in Hebrew and English. The old man gave me his and his wife’s Jordanian passports and I wrote their names and addresses on the questionnaire. He was born in 1932. City of birth: Bethlehem. I hesitated at country, wanting not to complicate his entry, before writing what it said in the passport: Palestine. The purpose of their visit was to see their daughter. They thanked me and went ahead to the passport booth, where a young policewoman was polite to them both. The man laughed at something she said and then, taking his wife’s hand and wheeling his smart new suitcase, walked outside to a taxi.
Next at the passport counter came the man in the suit. After presenting his American